Birth order may not shape personality after all Guarino, .docx

Birth order may not shape personality after all
Guarino, Ben . The Washington Post (Online) , Washington,
D.C.: WP Company LLC d/b/a The
Washington Post. Mar 14, 2019.
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Birth order, according to conventional wisdom, molds
personality: Firstborn children, secure with their place in the
family and expected to be the mature ones, grow up to be
intellectual, responsible and conformist. Younger
siblings work harder to get their parents' attention, take more
risks and become creative rebels.
That's the central idea in psychologist Frank J. Sulloway's
"Born to Rebel," an influential book on birth order that
burst, like a water balloon lobbed by an attention-seeking third-
born, onto the pop psychology scene two decades
ago. Sulloway's account of the nuclear family claimed that
firstborn children command their parents' attention and
resources, so later-borns must struggle to carve out their niche.

Sibling behaviors then crystallize into adult
personalities.
"I thought —and I still think —it's very plausible and intuitive,"
said Ralph Hertwig, a psychologist at the Max Planck
Institute for Human Development in Berlin, who published a
study on unequal parental investment with Sulloway in
2002.
The trouble is the growing pile of evidence, Hertwig's included,
that's tilted against it.
Birth order does not appear to influence personality in adults,
according to several ambitious studies published in
the past few years. This new wave of research relied on larger
data sets and more robust statistical methods than
earlier reports that claimed to find a relationship between birth
order and personality. Hertwig, for his part,
predicted he would find evidence that later-borns are daredevils
when he embarked on a recent study of risky
behaviors. He did not.
"Our results indicate that birth order does not influence the
propensity to take risks in adults," Hertwig's
collaborator Tomás Lejarraga, director of the Decision Science
Laboratory at Spain's University of the Balearic
Islands, said of their study on birth order published this week in

the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. "There seems to be a growing consensus that birth
order does not influence personality in a way that
can be measured in adulthood."
The latest study had three prongs: biographical data of explorers
and revolutionaries; a survey of 11,000 German
households; and an elaborate assessment, called the Basel-
Berlin Risk Study, which measured risky behavior of
1,500 people through interviews and experiments.
The Basel-Berlin Risk Study, a day's worth of about 40
psychological tests, "is one of the most exhaustive attempts
to measure risk preference," Lejarraga said. Researchers asked
participants about driving too fast, unprotected sex
and other dicey behaviors. The participants also performed
simple experiments. Hertwig gave the example of a
game in which subjects had two options: receiving $10 (the safe
choice) or gambling on a 10 percent chance to
win $100.
"None of these behavioral measures showed any credible
relationship between being a later-born and taking more
risks," the study authors wrote. The household survey didn't
find a relationship between self-reports of riskiness
and birth order. Neither did examining the birth orders of

almost 200 people who made the "risky life decision" to
become revolutionaries or explorers, such as mountaineer
Edmund Hillary, guerrilla fighter Che Guevara and
socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg.
"This paper is very clear and it convincingly shows that there
are no birth order effects on risk-taking," said Stefan
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Schmukle, a psychologist at University of Leipzig in Germany
who was not involved with this study.
Schmukle and his colleagues, in a study published in 2015,
assessed birth order for about 20,000 people in the
United States, Germany and Great Britain. The team found that
birth order did not alter any of five broad
personality traits. Those traits, what psychologists call the "Big
Five," were openness, conscientiousness,
extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. A follow-up study
on more specific characteristics, published by
Schmukle two years later, did not find any effect of birth order,
either.
Rodica Damian, a social psychologist at the University of
Houston, studied more than 370,000 high school
students and also concluded, in 2015, that birth order does not

influence the Big Five. This sample size, Damian
said, was "larger than all of the previous samples from the past
hundred years put together."
The studies by Schmukle and Damian found evidence that birth
order does slightly influence intelligence.
Firstborns, on average, had an advantage of an IQ point or two.
Other birth order studies have found this, too. One
hypothesis suggests that parents provide more mental
stimulation to firstborns, especially before the parents'
energy and attention are divided among their other children.
It may seem strange that effects of experiences in very early
childhood persist into adulthood. But well-designed,
long-term studies such as the Abecedarian Project, which began
in the 1970s, show the importance of enriched
experience. Compared with a control group, infants and toddlers
in the Abecedarian Project, who received high-
quality child care and played educational games, performed
better on reading and math tests in their 20s and were
more likely to go to college.
But before all you firstborns lord your enhanced brains over
your siblings, beware: The typical intelligence bonus
from birth order is so small that "at an individual level it'll
never make a difference in your life," Damian said.

One reason it has taken so long to challenge the idea that birth
order influences personality is that, before 2011,
social scientists struggled to publish "null effects," Damian
said. Null effects are results that show no statistically
significant relationships among variables in a study. The social
science community began to embrace null effects,
she said, after it repeatedly failed to reproduce the results of
classic experiments. There is "an increasing interest
in good quality methods and increasing tolerance for people
saying no," Damian said. With that came studies like
Damian's, Schmukle's and this week's report. These, she said,
represent the standard against which birth order
effects should be judged.
Sulloway, a psychologist at the University of California at
Berkeley, disputed the relevance of the biographical
examples in the newest study. He made a distinction, not made
by the study authors, between "technical" and
"radical" revolutionaries. Technical revolutions are a firstborn's
game, he said, thanks in part to a "slight advantage
in IQ." Sulloway gave the example of Isaac Newton's and Albert
Einstein's work in physics. Later-born radical
revolutionaries, such as evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin or
astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, offer ideas so
unorthodox they could upset social norms, he said.

Later-borns also take risks in sports as well as the sciences,
Sulloway said. In a 1968 study, psychologist Richard
Nisbett suggested that later-borns disproportionately played
dangerous sports at Ivy League colleges because
firstborns were "more frightened by the prospect of physical
injury." In 2010, Sulloway observed that Major League
Baseball players are 10 times more likely to steal bases if they
were later-borns.
The late researcher Judith Rich Harris, who did not support
theories of birth order, argued that randomness
explained such observations. "Chance is probably the reason
why a larger-than-expected proportion of a sample of
stripteasers, and a larger-than-expected proportion of the
scientists who founded SETI (the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence), were firstborns," she wrote.
"Taking off one's clothes in public and searching for
extraterrestrials are not the sort of dull but prestigious
occupations we usually think of in connection with the
'firstborn personality'!"
As for large studies, Sulloway countered Schmukle's null results
by citing "a somewhat more impressive and well-
controlled" 2018 study of Swedish siblings, which concluded
that firstborns were more likely to hold leadership

positions, whereas later-borns were more likely to be self-
employed.
Schmukle said "this effect is rather small" and could be
explained by cognitive, not personality, differences.
Even though birth order does not appear to shape grown-up
personalities, we are not immune to it, Damian said.
Thanks to cultural customs of primogeniture, firstborns may
take over the family business or inherit the family
fortune. Damian's current work, which is not yet published,
examines birth order and education.
There's a persistent idea that Ivy League schools, for instance,
are filled with firstborns. Harvard's class of 2021 is
40 percent firstborns, 32 percent youngest children, 14 percent
middle siblings and 12 percent only children,
according to a 2017 survey of its incoming freshman. But
wealthy, well-educated families are typically small
(which means they have proportionately more firstborns) and
this could explain Harvard University's large firstborn
population, two economists suggested in 2012.
"There is a small effect where firstborns get higher levels of
education," Damian said. "If you only pay for college

for the firstborn, or the money runs out by the time the second-
born is old enough, then that will influence their
life."
Damian has described birth order personalities as a "zombie
theory" that lurches forward despite the evidence
against it. Once we've accepted an idea, it's often hard to let go.
We're also apt to confuse birth order and age. "Some of the
birth order effects that we observe in everyday life are
not birth order effects, but actually are age effects," Schmukle
said. Conscientiousness, for instance, increases
during adolescence into young adulthood. "It is not surprising
that, when you look at differences within families,
that firstborns are more conscientious than later-borns," he said.
But take age out of the picture, and the effect
disappears.
The possibility also remains that birth order influences
personalities in children, Hertwig said, but those effects
vanish when people become adults.
"Birth order research is 100 years old," Hertwig said, with roots
in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. "We are getting
closer and closer to the truth. But I wouldn't say yet that we
have fully understood the true picture."

DETAILS
Subject: Parents &parenting; Families &family life; Birth order;
Studies; Experiments;
Intelligence; Influence; Personality; Professional baseball;
Psychologists
Location: Germany
Publication title: The Washington Post (Online); Washington,
D.C.
Publication year: 2019
Publication date: Mar 14, 2019
Section: Science
Publisher: WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post
Place of publication: Washington, D.C.
Country of publication: United States, Washington, D.C.
Publication subject: General Interest Periodicals--United States
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Yes, Tyler is still a boy.
That's what people who heard about him have wondered.
After a Maryland couple decided to listen to their 5-year-old
daughter's urgent and persistent insistence that she was a boy,
after a psychiatrist told them it would be healthy to let the child
live as a boy, after they let him pick a boy name and found a
school that would enroll the child in kindergarten as a boy last
year, Tyler's parents have had no second thoughts.

"It's not a phase," said his mother, Jean. "Anyone who meets
him says, 'Yeah, that's a boy.' "
It's only the people who have never met him who wonder.
More than 18 months into the public switch, Tyler shows no
signs of ever wanting to be Kathryn again.
I wrote about the family's wrenching decision and learning
process last year. I walked with this family through some of the
first steps it took in the public transition and watched
throughout the year as the child blossomed and flourished in
kindergarten. (The Washington Post decided to use family
members' middle names and the name they would've given
Kathryn if she had been born a boy to protect their privacy.)
I can tell you from plenty of firsthand observation that Tyler is
doing great.
"Come on! Let's play Batman!" he screamed to my younger son,
his partner in crime on a recent play date. The two boys swam
together, compared Lego guys and had sword fights.
Whenever the family watches television, Tyler roots for the boy
characters.
His home looks like a house with a son. Karate gear, soccer
balls, cars, trucks and pirate swords abound. At school, he's a
boy. Plain and simple.
"It became a lot easier once the transition was done," Jean said.
"The dust settled, and everything is relatively easy now."
At 6, Tyler is on the younger side of the transgender
community. But that's not because he is unusual. Most
transgender adults say they knew from a very young age that
they felt miscast in their bodies. And doctors agree that gender
identity usually manifests between 3 and 6 years of age.
What's different is that Tyler's parents - both schoolteachers and
coaches - decided to listen to their child. They ignored the
family members who expressed shock and disbelief. They
ignored the teasing from a neighborhood bully. They ignored
the gossip among some co-workers.
Instead, Jean and Stephen let Tyler pick his name, his clothes
and his toys. Instantly a happier, healthier child emerged from

the surly preschooler who was always fighting over dresses and
leotards and the word "she."
Since I recounted their journey, Jean and Stephen have met
seven other families in the area who have very young gender-
variant kids.
They are starting an informal support group, linking all the
families online to talk about things like school enrollment,
sports, bathroom use - all the logistics that come with a switch
at an early age.
Their current challenge is legally changing their child's name.
Tyler's father would like to take him and his older sister to see
his homeland, outside the United States. But the idea of
applying for a passport and traveling abroad with a girl's name
and a boy's picture on a passport scares them to death. So
they've decided to postpone any travel.
The gender change came up not long ago when Stephen took
Tyler to a night pediatric clinic with a bad cough. Dad asked the
staff to make the insurance claim out in the child's female name,
since that's who is covered. But they didn't. And now their
insurance company is eyeballing them for insurance fraud
because of a claim made for a child who doesn't legally exist.
"So it's times like this, when it surprises you, and you deal with
something new," Jean said.
To change his name legally, they face one big roadblock.
"In this county, they require you to publish a name change, to
make sure no one contests it. That guarantees him no privacy,"
she said. So they are now pushing to allow a name change under
a sealed document.
This is something courts will be seeing more of. Increasingly,
kids like Tyler are gaining mainstream acceptance.
In May, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, the nation's manual for mental health diagnosis,
eliminated the term "gender identity disorder" and replaced it
with the less stigmatizing "gender dysphoria."
But inclusion in the manual ensures that people like Tyler will
have access to services - from counseling to medical procedures

such as puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery - if
that's what he wants as an adult.
His parents will have to find a doctor who will begin tracking
him for signs of early puberty next year. And once there is a
sign - they are a family of early bloomers, and that trait is
genetic, Jean said - they will have to decide whether to begin
giving him puberty blockers to stop breasts and curves from
blooming.
But right now, Tyler is just 6. And although his parents stay
awake at night worrying about what a transgender adolescence
holds for them, the issues today are much simpler. Tyler enters
the boy's bathroom, but is instructed to always use a stall.
When he began asking for play dates, his mom wrestled a little
bit with whether she is obligated to tell the other parents that
under his clothes, Tyler looks like Kathryn. She decided that
unless it's a sleepover, she won't.
Tyler has taken matters into his own hands on at least one
occasion, Jean said, by telling a pal that he is transgender.
"Whatever," the kid said, and they dived back into trucks and
light-saber play.
Through his sister, Tyler has access to all things girly and
sparkly. So if the desire to identify, play or live as a girl ever
struck Tyler, the opportunity is there.
But so far, no interest.
He wears boy clothes, makes boy friends and plays typical boy
games. He gets mad when his sister tries to put makeup on him.
Yup, still a boy.
[email protected]
Twitter: @petulad
For previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/dvorak.
Source: Washington Post, The, 07/12/2013
Item: wapo.eab8b398-ea0f-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211
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Abstract
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[...]some of what she heard was scary: children taking puberty
blockers in elementary school and teens embarking on hormone
therapy before they'd even finished high school. In the United
States, children have been openly transitioning genders for
probably less than a decade, said Jack Drescher, a New York
psychiatrist who is a leader in the field of gender orientation.
Full Text
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· Kathryn wanted pants. And short hair. Then trucks and

swords.
Her parents, Jean and Stephen, were fine with their toddler's
embrace of all things boy. They've both been schoolteachers and
coaches in Maryland and are pretty immune to the quirky stuff
that kids do.
But it kept getting more intense, all this boyishness from their
younger daughter. She began to argue vehemently - as only a
tantrum-prone toddler can - that she was not a girl.
"I am a boy," the child insisted, at just 2 years old.
And that made Jean uneasy. It was weird.
"I am a boy" became a constant theme in struggles over
clothing, bathing, swimming, eating, playing, breathing.
Jean and Stephen gave up trying to force Kathryn to wear the
frilly dresses Grandma kept sending. Kathryn wanted nothing to
do with her big sister Moyin's glittery, sparkly pink approach to
the world. (Moyin attends school with my son, which is how I
came to know the family. The Washington Post is using the
family's middle names to protect their identity beyond their
community, where their situation already is widely known.)
Kathryn didn't even want to be around other little girls, let
alone acknowledge that she biologically is one.
Jean tried to put her daughter's behavior to rest. She sat down
with a toddler-version of an anatomy book and showed Kathryn,
by then 3, the cartoonish drawings of a naked boy and girl.
"See? You're a girl. You have girl parts," Jean told her big-eyed
daughter. "You've always been a girl."
Kathryn looked up at her mom, incomprehension clouding her
round face.
"When did you change me?" the child asked.
The questions begin
Was something wrong with Kathryn?
Her little girl's brain was different. Jean could tell. She had
heard about transgender people, those who are one gender
physically but the other gender mentally. Who hadn't caught the
transgendered Chaz Bono drama on "Dancing With the Stars"?
"But this young? In kids?" Jean wondered. She had grown up in

a traditional family in the Midwest, with a mother who'd gone
to medical school after having children. Jean considered herself
open-minded, but this was clearly outside her realm of
experience.
She went online to see if a book about transgender kids even
existed. It did - "The Transgender Child: A Handbook for
Families and Professionals." Its summary read: "What do you do
when your toddler daughter's first sentence is that she's a boy?
What will happen when your preschool son insists on wearing a
dress to school? Is this ever just a phase? How can you explain
this to your neighbors and family?"
Bingo.
When it arrived at their Maryland home, Jean ripped through it,
soaking up every word. But she couldn't bring herself to share
with her husband what she'd read.
Jean, 38, and Stephen, 40, had met at a Washington area gym,
where both taught classes. They married in 2001.
Jean eventually quit teaching to stay home with her kids and
continue her education. Stephen, who comes from an immigrant
family, teaches science at a public high school, where he is
beloved by many of his students. His Facebook page floods with
their hellos and happy birthdays. He is vocal about encouraging
girls to buck the stereotypes in science.
Still, Jean wasn't sure how he'd react to her suspicions that
Kathryn might be transgender. She decided she wouldn't voice
them unless she was totally convinced herself.
She went back online and watched videos of parents talking
about their realization that their child was transgender. They all
described a variation of the conversation she'd had with
Kathryn: "Why did you change me?" "God made a mistake with
me." "Something went wrong when I was in your belly."
Many talked about their painful decision to allow their children
to publicly transition to the opposite gender - a much tougher
process for boys who wanted to be girls.
Some of what Jean heard was reassuring: Parents who took the
plunge said their children's behavior problems largely

disappeared, schoolwork improved, happy kid smiles returned.
But some of what she heard was scary: children taking puberty
blockers in elementary school and teens embarking on hormone
therapy before they'd even finished high school.
All of it is a new and controversial phenomenon.
In the United States, children have been openly transitioning
genders for probably less than a decade, said Jack Drescher, a
New York psychiatrist who is a leader in the field of gender
orientation. There is very little to go on, scientifically, to
support that approach, and the very idea of labeling young
children as transgender is shocking to many people.
But to others, it makes perfect sense.
"In children, gender solidifies at about 3 to 6," explained
Patrick Kelly, a psychiatrist with the division of child and
adolescent psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Children's Center.
That's about the age when girls gravitate to girl things and boys
to boy things. It's when the parents who ban baby dolls or toy
guns see their little girl swaddle and cradle a stuffed animal or
watch in awe as their boy makes guttural, spitting Mack truck
sounds while four-wheeling his toast over his eggs, then uses
his string cheese as a sword.
And it's the age when a child whose gender orientation is at
odds with his or her biology begins expressing that disconnect -
in Kathryn's case, loudly.
The American Psychiatric Association has an official diagnosis
for this: gender identity disorder in children.
Those who have it, according to the association's Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, experience "a
persistent and intense distress about assigned sex, together with
a desire to be (or insistence that one is) of the other sex. There
is a persistent preoccupation with the dress and activities of the
opposite sex and repudiation of the individual's own sex."
And, it adds, "mere tomboyishness in girls or girlish behavior in
boys is not sufficient" to warrant the diagnosis. It requires "a
profound disturbance of the normal gender identity."
The manual is being updated this year, and a task force that

Drescher serves on is studying whether to remove the word
"disorder" from the diagnosis and instead call the condition
"gender incongruence."
Whatever it's called, it can't always be solved by letting girls
wear pants or boys wear dresses, psychiatrists say. Many of the
kids have gender dysphoria, a persistent dislike of their bodies.
They may shower with their clothes on so they don't have to see
themselves. Or demand to know when their penises will grow
in. Or, in extreme cases, try to cut their penises off.
Parents who ignore or deny these problems can make life
miserable for their kids, who can become depressed or suicidal,
psychiatrists say. Outside their homes, the transgendered are
frequently marginalized and scorned, pushed into an
underworld, outside of the mainstream. More often than the rest
of the population, transgender teens and adults are harassed,
assaulted, even killed. Remember that beating caught on video
at a Baltimore County McDonald's last year? Or the off-duty
D.C. police officer who was accused of standing on the hood of
a car and shooting a transgendered woman through the
windshield?
Jean didn't want Kathryn to hate herself or be subjected to hate
from others. Maybe allowing her to declare herself a boy in
preschool would make life easier in the long run.
Yet not everyone who treats gender identity disorder in children
believes in allowing them to transition to the opposite sex when
they are young.
Kenneth Zucker, a child psychologist in Toronto who is on the
psychiatric association's task force, advocates neutrality for
kids struggling with their gender identity.
Children who see him get the Barbies or toy soldiers replaced
by puzzles and board games. His theory is that kids should be
allowed to grow into a gender and not be categorized.
There's some evidence - most of it anecdotal because so little
research exists - that gender dysphoria is a phase many children
outgrow.
In the United States, it's impossible to know how many children

have gender identity problems because the condition usually
goes unacknowledged by parents and pediatricians, said
Edgardo Menvielle, who counsels transgender kids at Children's
National Medical Center in the District. About a dozen children
from the area belong to his support group, and hundreds of
families across the country are part of his online support
network.
In the decade that Menvielle has been counseling such children,
he says that about 80 percent end up switching back to what
their biology tells them. The rest remain transgender into
adulthood.
'Not just a tomboy'
Was Kathryn going through a phase? After many hours of
research and another full summer of bathing-suit fights, Jean
didn't think so.
Kathryn was 4 when Jean finally broached the subject with her
husband.
"Have you noticed that Kathryn wants to be a boy?" she
remembered asking one night as she and Stephen were washing
the dinner dishes after putting the kids to bed.
"She's just a tomboy," Stephen replied.
Jean shook her head.
"No, Stephen, I'm pretty sure Kathryn is transgender. She's not
just a tomboy," she said. "And I think maybe we should start
letting her call herself a boy."
Stephen thought she was nuts. "I told her she was making too
much of this," he recalled.
As a teacher, Stephen knew how cruel kids could be. He
imagined his child walking into the social battlefield that is
school, insisting she was a boy when under her clothing, she
wasn't.
What about bathrooms? P.E.? The prom? How would all that
go?
Despite his resistance, Stephen promised his wife that he would
pay closer attention to Kathryn's behavior and really listen for
her "I am a boy" anthem.

It didn't take long.
"We were in the car. I was driving," Stephen told me.
Kathryn was in the back and grabbed a book off the seat.
"Daddy, I'm going to read you a story, okay?" Kathryn said,
opening a random book and pretending to read. "It's about a
little boy who was born. But he was born like a girl."
Stephen nearly slammed the brakes, then listened as the story
unfolded about how unhappy the little boy was.
"Okay. I'm listening, Jean," he said after he got home.
The diagnosis
They took Kathryn to a psychologist outside of Philadelphia
who specializes in treating the transgendered. Michele Angello
confirmed what Jean had long suspected: Kathryn had gender
dysphoria. She recommended that Kathryn be allowed to live as
a boy, a prospect that filled Stephen with dread but his 4-year-
old with elation.
Kathryn wanted to be called "he" right away. And Kathryn
wanted to be called Talon, then Isaac, but finally settled on a
permanent boy's name in the fall. (The Post is using Tyler, the
name his parents say they would have given him if he'd been
born a boy.)
"When we finally let Tyler shop in the boys' clothing
department, it was like the skies opened up," Jean said.
They switched to saying he/him/his and stopped using the name
"Kathryn" at home.
It was a huge upheaval, a change Jean and Stephen had to
remind themselves of every day. Then came the next challenge:
telling family, friends, teachers and other parents that their
daughter had become their son.
The reaction
Tyler made his public debut at Sunday school at their
Presbyterian church.
The teenagers who help out in class laughed that it took
Kathryn's parents so long to figure out they had a Tyler.
The pastor there was so supportive of the family that she invited
a panel from a transgender support group to come just before

services one Sunday in January and explain what Tyler and his
family were going through. The room was packed.
"We're so happy to be here. They usually put us in the
basement," said Catherine Hyde, the leader of the group and the
parent of a transgender teenager with a tough story.
At 4, Will told his mom: "Something went wrong in your belly.
I was supposed to be a girl," Hyde said.
She and her husband wheedled the Barbie dolls out of Will's
hands, told him over and over again that "You can't wear tutus!"
They put all their parental might into erasing his behavior.
In response, Will threatened suicide when he was 6. He hated
the five years of relentless karate lessons they insisted on to
toughen him up. Given the chance to decorate his own room, he
came up with "the pinkest, pompomiest bedroom in Howard
County," Hyde said.
They went to therapists, who said Will was probably just gay.
Hyde and her Marine husband could live with that.
"You can be as gay as you want, but if you go trans on me, it's
on your own money, your own time and out of my house," she
remembered telling her son, then 15. Hyde gives lots of
speeches and presentations about her journey. Each time I've
seen her speak, she still tears up a bit when she recounts what
she told her child.
It was years before Hyde and her husband acknowledged their
child's agony. They finally asked Will if he wanted to take
puberty blockers. He said yes. And eventually, a whole new
child, now 18, emerged.
All those years of pain, therapy, suffering and strife - that is
what Jean wants to avoid.
She hoped the people at the church would understand. Between
cookies and coffee after the presentation, many came over to
hug her.
When it came time for Tyler to make the switch at preschool,
Jean and Stephen had to write a very uncomfortable letter to all
the parents explaining what was happening.
"If I had a child with autism, I wouldn't have to do this," Jean

sighed.
They struggled with whether to include the words "gender
dysphoria." "I didn't want them to think there was something
wrong with our child. Just something different," she said.
They kept the medical term in there so other parents wouldn't
think this was just loose and creative parenting. "I don't want
people to think I'm just indulging a phase. That's not what this
is."
Tyler's sister, who's 8, was much more casual about describing
her transgender sibling. "It's just a boy mind in a girl body,"
Moyin explained matter-of-factly to her second-grade
classmates at her private school, which will allow Tyler to start
kindergarten as a boy, with no mention of Kathryn.
Staff members recently had a training session on gender identity
disorder to prepare not only for Tyler but also for other
transgender kids who may be arriving. This year alone, at least
two other families have contacted the school about enrolling
their transgender kids, according to its director of admissions.
Not everyone has been accepting of what Jean and Stephen are
doing. Some members of Stephen's family were incredulous
when he sent them letters about Tyler's transformation.
Jean and Stephen got into a huge fight with Tyler's gymnastics
coach, who insisted he keep wearing a leotard to practice
because his registration form said "female."
Tyler was miserable pulling on a leotard when the boys in class
all got to wear shorts and a T-shirt.
"Finally, we just got someone to change F to M on the
paperwork," Jean said angrily. "Why does the coach care so
much about what's in my child's underpants anyways?"
More than once, Jean has come home from the gym infuriated
because someone was gossiping about her child. Just the other
day, she spotted a co-worker and another adult pointing and
laughing at Tyler, who finally got to wear just swim trunks at
the pool.
Jean marched over to them and said, "I can provide you with a
lot of information about transgender children if you like."

They clammed up.
"You never meant to, but you become this advocate. All day,
every day," she told me, clearly exhausted.
A recent family trip to Disney World raised the issue of how to
handle the plane tickets. What if they booked the ticket in
Tyler's name, but the TSA did some kind of a full-body scan
and saw that Tyler's biology is female?
Like a peanut allergy mom with her EpiPen, the transformation
of Kathryn to Tyler means the family always travels with a
"Safe Folder." It has birth records, medical records and the all-
important diagnosis of gender dysphoria and the doctor
recommendation that Kathryn be allowed to live as a boy. Jean
never knows when an encounter with Tyler could result in a
grown-up freak-out or even a call to Child and Family Services.
It's always a fear looming over the family.
Difficult decisions
Tyler doesn't really like to talk about Kathryn or even
acknowledge she existed.
"I'm not transgender," he fumes when he hears the word, often
spoken by his mom as she explains things. "I. Am. A. Boy."
During one of my visits a few months ago, he showed me their
family picture wall, full of pictures of two girls in lovely
dresses.
"No Tyler," he pouted.
Those are issues that are easy for Tyler's parents to fix.
But in about five years, they will have to decide whether to put
Tyler on puberty blockers to keep his body from maturing and
menstruating. Using those drugs represents a leap of faith,
psychiatrists said, though the effects are reversible if the
puberty blockers are halted.
The much tougher call comes when kids are about 15 or 16. At
that age, they can begin hormone injections that will make them
grow the characteristics of the opposite biological sex.
That's a method being pioneered by Norman Spack, director of
one of the nation's first gender identity medical clinics, at
Children's Hospital Boston, and an advocate of early gender

transitions. Those hormone treatments essentially create a
nearly gender-neutral being, making sex-change surgery far less
painful and expensive for young adults. But the hormones also
make people infertile - a daunting and irreversible decision for
parents to make when a child is 15 or 16. Only a handful have
opted to do so, Spack said.
Jean e-mailed me an article about the drug controversy late one
night, the time that many parents stay up and fret about their
kids. "See what we're facing?!" she wrote.
She acknowledges anxieties about what lies ahead. But Jean and
Stephen aren't harboring doubts about what they are doing now.
"If Tyler wants to be Kathryn again, that's fine," she said. "But
right now, this works. He's happy. I just want my child to be
happy."
As for Tyler, he is reveling in his new identity. The constant
nagging, fighting, obsessing about being a boy is gone. Tyler is
just Tyler, a high-energy kid with a Spider-Man-themed
bedroom.
On my last visit, he took a brief break from playing with my
boys and their endless supply of space cruisers to show me a
new addition to the family picture wall. It now features a
prominent photo of Tyler in short hair and a red polo shirt. He
is smiling.
[email protected]
Word count: 3181
(Copyright The Washington Post Company, May 20, 2012)
Abstract
Translate Abstract
Whitman's beach week last year, the annual fling of the newly
graduated at Delaware's Dewey Beach, gave new meaning to the
informal aspects of buddysex. Social life that week
"transcended boundaries and cliques," says Marisa Rainey, now
a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley. "People
who never talked to you at school opened their doors and said

come in."
Such stories do not surprise a team of social scientists at
Bowling Green State University in Ohio who have interviewed
1,300 Toledo area students in grades 7-11 about dating and
relationships. Its federally funded survey, highly unusual for the
intimate nature of its questions, showed that among the teens
who had engaged in intercourse -- from 8 percent of 7th graders
to 55 percent of 11th graders -- one-third said they had had sex
with someone whose attachment went no further than
friendship. The proportion would have been higher if behaviors
other than intercourse had been included.
Hooking up has its advantages. It's cheaper than dating, which
in the era of $9 movie tickets is no small thing. Also, it is
intentionally vague. "You can make it clear you did something
but protect your reputation," [Julia Kay] explains. Rainey at
Berkeley says friends press the friend who wanders in at dawn:
"Did you hook up or hook up?"
More
Full Text
· By today's standards, the high school girl from Montgomery
County was a slow starter when it came to sex, having reached
ninth grade before she kissed a guy. She just couldn't see how
to fit a boy into heavy loads of honors homework, soccer
matches and baby-sitting.
By 11th grade, she had found the answer: "buddysex," or sexual
encounters with friends, in this case a half-dozen private-school
boys, no strings attached. At parties mostly, and on the
weekend. In closets and bathrooms, parents' bedrooms and
friends' parents' bedrooms. Helped along by Smirnoff Ice or, on
one occasion, bottles of Dom Perignon.
"September through December is a blur," she recalls as winter
sunlight glints off her shoulder-length blond hair and warms her
Cafe Mocha. "Let's see, I hooked up with . . . hmmm, I'll call
him Rob. Then Rob introduced me to Paul. Then there was
Colin, and B.T., and Brad, and Steve. I was having so much fun

I didn't even think of having a serious relationship. There was
no romance. None."
These arrangements didn't include intercourse, she says, but did
include mutual oral sex in some cases, "by the second or third
time."
"We're still all friends, though not in that way," she insists.
Really? Yes, really: "I talked to B.T. just last night. And I'm
going to Paul's basketball game on Friday."
So casually said, as if she were describing courses from the
catalogue of the college she hopes to attend.
In earlier decades this girl and others like her might have been
shunned, but no longer. For one thing, adolescents no longer see
oral sex as sex. For another, sexual liberation of the late 1960s
shattered the rules and rituals of romance for women in their
twenties. It was just a matter of time before their younger
sisters embraced the same freedoms, while still pining on
occasion for the dinners, flowers and wooing they had
abandoned.
"I know so many girls like this one," says Julia Kay, who
graduated from Montgomery Blair High School last year and
now attends Brown University.
The girl hookup culture is known in some circles as Ally
McBeal feminism. Dozens of young women described it for this
story, some as participants, others as observers. The gist of
what they said is this: Many girls don't have the time or the
energy required for an intense relationship right now, or they
can't find a guy who wants one. But they possess enormous
sexual energy and believe they have every right to enjoy it in
whatever form they choose, just as the Fox network's lusty
lawyer did.
They don't hook up with just anyone; usually, it's with someone
they know at least casually, or, if intercourse is included, with a
less printable version of "sexbuddy." They tell themselves they
stand less chance of waking up pregnant or infected that way.
At Brown, so many freshmen hook up with other freshmen in
their dorms that they've given it a name: unitcest. Ryan Rogers,

a senior at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, says she
knows only three girls at that school who are involved in
serious relationships. "That's it. For most of the rest, hooking
up is it."
Whitman's beach week last year, the annual fling of the newly
graduated at Delaware's Dewey Beach, gave new meaning to the
informal aspects of buddysex. Social life that week
"transcended boundaries and cliques," says Marisa Rainey, now
a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley. "People
who never talked to you at school opened their doors and said
come in."
Anticipating such freedom, some students arrived "with lists of
people they intended to hook up with," says Marina Eisner, now
at Cornell University.
A mischiefmaker among the seniors -- a guy, as it happened --
leaked word of the hookups to a junior girl still enrolled at
Whitman. This girl then sent an e-mail to various members of
the Whitman community, listing about 40 names of graduates
and who had hooked up with whom. Some names showed up
several times with different partners, according to students who
saw the list.
Such stories do not surprise a team of social scientists at
Bowling Green State University in Ohio who have interviewed
1,300 Toledo area students in grades 7-11 about dating and
relationships. Its federally funded survey, highly unusual for the
intimate nature of its questions, showed that among the teens
who had engaged in intercourse -- from 8 percent of 7th graders
to 55 percent of 11th graders -- one-third said they had had sex
with someone whose attachment went no further than
friendship. The proportion would have been higher if behaviors
other than intercourse had been included.
"The kids make a distinction between casual sex and
relationship sex," says Monica Longmore, a social psychologist
on the team. "But casual sex is not a one-night stand. It's 'He
was my boyfriend last month, I'm not dating him anymore but I
was feeling kind of blue so I did it,' or 'I used to date him, and

we broke up. But the sex is so good, we still do that.'
"Some have a steady hookup. They say, 'On Fridays, that's what
we do.' "
Girls haven't become more promiscuous over the last decade, in
the old-fashioned meaning of that word. As the incidence of
oral sex has increased, the proportion of high school girls
engaging in intercourse has declined from 51 percent in 1991 to
43 percent in 2001, according to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.
Also, even as they seek the same sexual rush that guys
historically have enjoyed, young women confess to dreaming
about the romance of the old-fashioned pursuit: being wooed by
leisurely strolls, candlelight dinners, small gifts and other
gestures of courtship that were more common when their
mothers were their age.
Could this explain the large amounts of alcohol some girls say
they consume to make hooking up more palatable? So much has
changed, so fast, as gender rules have collapsed.
Less than a half-century ago, girls hung out mostly with other
girls, guys with other guys. A girl who was interested in a guy
never came right out and told him. She'd tell a girlfriend, who
would tell a male friend who would tell the guy in question.
Then she'd wait for the phone call.
If the call came, the two then might phone each other every
night, talking for hours before going out on their first date. The
steps after that were understood: a guy would offer a girl his
ring and the couple went steady. Maybe she got pinned or
lavaliered, then engaged and so forth.
Today the distance between genders has virtually dissolved.
Young women have taken PE with guys since elementary school
and gone to movies with them since middle school. They
compile coed Buddy Lists on their computer screens and think
nothing of instant-messaging guys or calling them on the phone.
They move into coed dorms at college and, in both high school
and college, go out frequently in coed groups.
If a couple wants to do something together, "it's not going to the

door and to a movie anymore," says Peggy Giordano, a
sociologist on the Bowling Green team. "The activities are the
same things you'd be doing with your friends anyway."
Dating implies commitment, says Eupil Muhn, a young man in
his first year at Georgetown University, and guys shy away
from that. "They tell me they're too young."
At Brown, advertisements for the annual fall ball, a dress-up
affair, made a big deal out of the fact that students could come
without a date.
"Otherwise, no one would have gone," says Kay.
Calling up a guy to go out, or handing him your phone number,
is no big deal in this world. When Rahima Kalala, a junior at
Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, saw a gorgeous
guy on the Metrobus one day "with the eyes of Lil Bow Wow,"
she didn't hesitate to slip him her home number before he got
off.
"If you want something you have to take the initiative," she
says.
She's in control. That's what many girls want, says Shannon
O'Hern, also a Brown freshman. O'Hern has a friend at another
college who hooks up regularly with a guy in the dorm. "She
decides when he can come to her room. She says, 'It's up to me.'
That's important to her." Cornell's Eisner relates a similar story
about a friend who hooks up with a young man she has known
for a while. "She's wants the guy to know she's using him as
much as he's using her."
Men might argue that women have always possessed more
control over relationships than was acknowledged. Perhaps, but
now it's in the open, and we're not just talking about who pays
for the burger.
We're talking attitude, the same assertive attitude you see in the
classroom and on the athletic field. "There's none of this 'Ooh,
I'm wearing your jacket' stuff," says Julie Nemirovsky, a
freshman at Emory University in Atlanta who has a boyfriend
on campus. Over winter break at home, she went out for coffee
with a guy she has known for years and it didn't occur to her to

tell her boyfriend. Why should she? "He's not my keeper," she
says.
The Bowling Green researchers were surprised by how secure
girls were about their relationships. Girls expressed
significantly more confidence than guys that they could refuse a
date, for example, or break up with someone they no longer
wanted to go out with, or control what a couple did together.
Boys were more likely to say they would change themselves for
a girl than the other way around. (Teen girl magazines
encourage these makeovers. "Find a look he -- and you -- will
love," gushes Seventeen's current prom issue, suggesting a guy
wear black Euro pants, a Ben Sherman shirt and hair gel that
will match the color of the girl's dress.)
Girls' sexual confidence shows up in surveys. In the Toledo
research, girls were more likely than guys to say they decided
how far a couple would go. In a nationwide study soon to be
released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, young women ages
15 to 24 were less likely than young men to report feeling
pressured to engage in intercourse.
The average age young women go all all the way the first time?
It's the same as it is for boys, sixteen and a half, according to a
separate release from Kaiser.
Hooking up has its advantages. It's cheaper than dating, which
in the era of $9 movie tickets is no small thing. Also, it is
intentionally vague. "You can make it clear you did something
but protect your reputation," Kay explains. Rainey at Berkeley
says friends press the friend who wanders in at dawn: "Did you
hook up or hook up?"
Most significantly, hooking up requires no commitment of time
or emotion, at least that's what is assumed. You can hook up
once during a party, once again after the party with someone
else and later in the week with a longtime friend. It seems the
perfect entertainment for young women planning to graduate
cum laude and take up medicine or law.
Many in this generation have been showered with praise and
possessions on demand.

They want what they want, now, and hookups certainly provide
that.
They also know that their parents expect nothing less than
academic and professional stardom. As one college freshman
notes wryly, "We're not looking to get married when we're 21
and graduate."
Since hooking up need not involve intercourse, they don't have
to worry about pregnancy. Oral sex is an acceptable alternative
and young women absolutely don't consider it sex.
"If we did, we'd be having sex all the time. We still have a
shred of self-respect," one freshman says.
In the Kaiser foundation's preliminary data, one-third of 15- to
17-year-olds, and two-thirds of 18- to 24-year-olds, said they
had had oral sex. Proportionately more whites reported it than
other race or ethnic groups.
No one uses a condom during oral sex, girls say. "That would be
considered absurd," says one. Although this generation has had
more sex education than any previous one, a sizable number
aren't aware that disease can be transmitted by mouth and that
condoms reduce that risk.
This concerns health professionals like those at Kaiser, who
publicize disturbing statistics: One out of four active teens
acquires a sexually transmitted disease every year; rates of
herpes and gonorrhea are increasing.
The hookup culture makes it more difficult for young women to
claim or prove rape. It also leads to confusion and injured
feelings, which girls talk about a lot among themselves.
If you can "hook up" with someone occasionally at a party but
not be "hanging out" with them; or be "seeing" someone, but not
"dating"; or "talking to" someone, but not really "having a
conversation," how does a girl know when she's headed toward
something serious, already there or, for that matter, when a
relationship has ended?
"It's so undefined. I hate it," says Brooke Mason, a freshman at
the University of Virginia.
In the hookup culture, if a guy wants to hook up but not date, he

probably doesn't care about taking it any further and a girl
shouldn't either. Hooking up also makes a later committed
relationship difficult. "If a girl wants a relationship with a guy,
we sometimes advise her not to hook up," Kay says.
Easier said than done. Plenty of girls hook up hoping for a
relationship, says researcher Giordano, and that's when they get
hurt. Conventions may have changed but feelings haven't.
Women have always shouldered the emotional burden of sexual
behavior -- after all, they're the ones who must carry the baby,
or decide to abort -- and to pretend that they can ignore their
emotions easily is poppycock.
The courtship routine of past generations produced its own high
levels of anxiety. Will he call? Did he call and Mom forgot to
tell me? Should I have kissed him good night on the first date or
waited for the second?
What has replaced that tradition may be worse. Now after a
night out, the girl asks herself not only whether the guy will
call her but whether she should call him. The cell phone and
Caller ID make it possible to see whether he's called, 24-7.
Even when you don't have any feelings for a guy you've been
with, Rainey says, you still want him to call you. "If he doesn't,
you worry, is there something wrong with me?"
"There's so much energy spent analyzing this," says Brown's
Kay. "If you're friends and then you hook up, are you still
friends or more than friends? Everything is in play."
No matter what a girl tells herself, it hurts to see the guy she
has been with hooking up with someone else, says Eisner. The
only way out of this dilemma, if you want to continue to hook
up, is to detach yourself emotionally. As Janis Joplin once sang,
freedom is just another word for nothin' left to lose.
Oh, but there is something left to lose, what dramatist Ben
Jonson 400 years ago called the "coupling of two souls." Young
women talk about this, too. If romance is reserved for the truly
serious, what guy will choose serious when he can get the other
stuff without committing more than a few hours of his time?
"Lots of guys don't even know what a date is," says Rainey.

"Wistful" is the only way to describe her tone.
She is sitting in a Bethesda coffeehouse over winter break,
sharing stories with old high school friends. She tells them
about the time that she and a guy at Berkeley went to a party
with friends "like we always do. Afterward, because there was a
possibility of something romantic between us, he assumed he
took me on a date. It wasn't even close. It's kind of a cheap
shortcut, guys don't have to put in any effort, not even a night
of being alone and having to converse with only you."
She sighs, as her friends all nod knowingly.
"I don't see a traditional date, ever," complains Brooke Mason.
Such discussions risk stereotyping all guys as unfeeling
cowboys and that's neither true nor fair. Senior boys in a class
at Eleanor Roosevelt High School recently talked about the
charm of pulling out a chair for a date, pouring one's heart out
to a mate, and the difference between lust and love.
Maybe they were trying to impress -- who knows? What we do
know is that in formal and informal surveys, girls place a higher
value on relationships than guys. Psychology professor
Longmore was reminded of girlish desire when her 3-year-old
daughter turned to her after watching Disney's "Beauty and the
Beast" and asked, "Mommy, when I grow up, will a man want to
dance with me?"
Longmore watches her female students study comfortably with
their male colleagues every day. She suspects that in years to
come they may not worry, as some of their mothers did, that
their identity and independence will be compromised in the
marriage bed or the corporate suite.
But when will they learn that just because you can do something
doesn't necessarily mean that you should? Who will teach them
that there is power in holding back?
If they don't date, how will they learn the skills of discernment,
empathy and patience that keep a marriage going?
"A series of fleeting liaisons will not help those traits,"
Longmore says. "That's why we want them to have dates, so
when they get married they'll have them. But if all they're doing

is screwing, forget it."
Among the little coffee group in Bethesda are a couple who
have been dating since their senior year, last year: Alice Barr,
now a freshman at Northwestern University, and Georgetown's
Muhn.
Barr and Muhn hold hands, and smile at each other, and, with
some urging, tell about their first kiss after a choral concert.
They get up to leave. They hug the other girls, then stroll out
the door arm-in-arm.
Four pairs of eyes follow them out.
"I think it would be nice to be courted," Mason sighs. Her
friend Julia Jacobson agrees: "I'm known as a big feminist on
campus, but I want to feel wanted."
Word count: 3156
Copyright The Washington Post Company Jan 19, 2003
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Abstract

Translate Abstract
The outcome? Levels of teen sexual activity look remarkably
similar here and abroad, but U.S. rates of teen pregnancy,
childbirth, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases are among
the highest of all industrialized nations, despite recent
decreases. At left and right above, see brief accounts of how
Western European and American perspectives compare.
Full Text
· In our bicultural household -- I am American, my husband is
Swedish -- we are trying to raise our children with the language,
cultures and values of both countries. In most cases this isn't
difficult. In one area, however, our values differ widely: My
husband, reflecting the predominant view in Sweden and much
of Western Europe, thinks sex is a normal part of adolescent
development. Like many in this country, I disagree, believing
it's better for teens to wait -- if not until marriage, at least until
they are in an adult, loving relationship.
As a health journalist, I wondered if one way of thinking is
demonstrably healthier, physically and psychologically. I
resolved to find out.
Among the findings that surprised me: Although prevalent
attitudes on teen sex differ in Western Europe and the United
States, the views of leading researchers and doctors on both
sides of the Atlantic do not. Their opinions lean much closer to
the European model. They tend to agree that the mixed message
America sends to teens about sex -- authorities say "don't"
while mass media screams "What are you waiting for?" --
endanger our children.
The outcome? Levels of teen sexual activity look remarkably
similar here and abroad, but U.S. rates of teen pregnancy,
childbirth, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases are among
the highest of all industrialized nations, despite recent
decreases. At left and right above, see brief accounts of how
Western European and American perspectives compare.
Credit: Special to The Washington Post

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